Special DAM News Feature Article – The Inhumanity Of DRM

David Diamond, author of the DAM Survival Guide and Marketing Director of Picturepark has written a special feature for DAM News which we have published today: The Inhumanity Of DRM. The article discusses the value of DRM and despite the numerous DRM related features that DAM vendors add to their products, whether many of them are actually worthwhile:

“Content inside a DAM can certainly be “digital rights managed,” within reason. Permissions can be configured, and watermarks can be applied. Sensitive metadata can be hidden from certain users, and who downloaded what can be tracked. But then what? How can a DAM protect content that has left the DAM? We spend millions researching and developing technologies and procedures that promise to offer post-DAM content protection, but how realistic is this? Should we train search engines to crawl the Internet looking for violations? Are you willing to embed virus-like code into your content that “phones home” to let you know where it is? How much would you be willing to pay for such technologies? How much would you trust them? More importantly is whether solutions like these would even be practical for you.” [Read More]

David also adds some worthwhile points about the lack of interoperability between DAM vendor products and how it isn’t possible to easily search across systems produced by different vendors, such that the situation is analogous to the pre-search engine era Internet. David’s assertion that Google has a greater understanding of the issues relating to information availability than DAM vendors (and the implications thereof) is an interesting, if contentious, observation which I’m sure some of our readers might have an opinion on also.